“ your statutory rights are non-effective ”

Apocolympic Diary – Risk Management

With the recent intervention of the 2012 Apocalypse Steering Committee, many Games events have been subject to regulatory amendments mandated by synergies inherent in the collaborative process. Fencing, in particular, has had its core qualities changed by Team Apocalypse, who have successfully challenged the use of the foil, the épée and sabre in favour of late medieval-style bastard swords and with them, two new point-scoring moves, the hack and the gore.

Even in training, the new equipment and moves have engendered some health and safety outcome issues and it remains to be seen whether the Apocalypse Steering Committee’s new compromises over the amended regulations will positively impact on the current outcome of the risk assessment; that assessment ended with the telling phrase ‘We’re all going to die’. It is hoped that we may be able to re-engineer the qualitative upshot using a linguistic hermeneutic model to facilitate a variant cognisance of the facts, viz., ‘We might possibly suffer a failure of existence as a short-run consequence of a steel-anatomical interface’.

Following a meeting between Games officials and the formal representatives of the 2012 Apocalypse, there have been some changes to the Synchronised Swimming and Water Polo competitions at the Aquatics Centre. Health and safety officials from the Games had expressed some concerns over proposals from our divine overlords to conduct these events in a pool of vitriol and molten brimstone which would also, it was thought, jeopardize the spirit of the Games.

Representatives of the 2012 Apocalypse appealed for a more inclusive line from the Games, noting that the Centre was constructed on an Iron Age burial site and that the ancestral spirits were angry and were demanding some form of redress.

Compromise was reached when Games officials agreed to contract Balfour Beatty to construct a henge in the warm-up pool and, as part of the Olympic Legacy, to instigate a quarterly regime of exorcisms by a British Standards 5750-compliant Catholic priest.